One of the key features of the global economy – and particularly of the “Pacific Rim economies” – that has most concerned us over recent months has been the immensely weak investment spending trends that are starting to appear across Asia. We firmly believe that this weakness in capital spending ...

Although the recent bond market sell-off may remind the market of 2003, we don’t believe US bonds will be as badly affected. By comparing the worst US bond sell-offs since 2003, we estimate that the 10-year US Treasury yield could hit a high of 2.8-3.2% by October.

We expect that profit margins will expand further in coming quarters, driven by a large corporate tax cut and continued industry rationalizations that further prove that Japan's structural profitability trend continues upward.

We do not expect the recent steepening of the bund yield curve to be the beginning of a sustained new trend. Moreover, Eurozone and German economic data, albeit improving, are not sufficient to support the higher bund yields on a sustained basis.

One of the reasons that we tend to eschew “black box” forecasting models of any economy is that we suspect that there are simply too many variables and discontinuities for even mathematicians with the skill of the late John Nash to ever really encompass effectively. In this context, One of the least understood or modelling-friendly “variables” within a macroeconomic system is the household savings rate...